Atten 8502D Pinout Replacement Iron Heating element

So you need to replace the soldering iron on your Atten 8502D Soldering Station. You could just buy the heating element, but you can find a complete soldering iron with cable for less than $12 on eBay. So It’s easier just to replace the whole thing.

It Doesn’t Work!

I have ordered replacement irons before (I’m very rough with my soldering station) just to find out that they don’t work. You get the dreaded S-E or H-E message on display and, obviously, something is wrong. What do you do now? Read on to find out.

How to Make It Work

Usually, the soldering iron has the wrong pins soldered to the connector. The eBay listing says that it works with Atten 8502D, but apparently, it doesn’t. So time for some testing.

Unscrew the tip of the soldering iron so you can pull out the small PCB inside the handle. The heating element has two colored wires and two white ones.

The white cables are for heating, and the colored ones are the temperature sensor. Use the continuity tester on your multimeter and check that the white wires are attached to the leads that go to pin 5 & 6. The polarity doesn’t matter because it’s AC.

Then use the ohm setting on your multimeter between the two colored wires. The resistance should go up when you hold your hands on the heating element and settle down again when blowing on the element. If it does, you know that you have a working heat sensor on the heating element.

These two wires should be connected to pin 1 and 2. So do a continuity test to find out which pins they are attached to. Finally, you have to open the connector and move the cables to the correct location.

Atten 8502D Pinout

So here are the pinouts of the Atten 8502D Soldering Station.

1. -Temp
2. +Temp
3. NC.
4. NC.
5. Heater Element
6. Heater Element
7. Center pin: GND

The +temp pin was soldered to pin 3 on my latest soldering iron, so all I had to do was to move it to pin 2. Finally a working soldering station again.